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2018 Anonymous Was A Woman Grants Awarded to 10 Artists, Deborah Roberts and Heather Hart Among Them

EVERY YEAR, 10 WOMEN ARTISTS receive Anonymous Was A Woman grants. The unrestricted awards of $25,000 go to women artists who are more than 40 years old. The 2018 recipients were just announced and Deborah Roberts, Heather Hart, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, and Michèle Stephenson, are among those selected.

Designed to support artists at a critical point in their careers so they can continue to advance their work and grow their practices, the grant recognizes “an artist’s accomplishments, artistic growth, originality and potential.” The name of the program refers to a line in Virginia Woolf’s extended essay “A Room of One’s Own,” which was published in book form in 1929.

Grant recipients are selected by nominators. The nominators are all women—distinguished art historians, curators, writers, and previous grantees. The awards were established in 1996 in response to the decision by the National Endowment for the Arts to stop providing support to individual artists, and since that time the nominators and the source of the grant funds have been unnamed.

That changed six months ago when Susan Unterberg revealed herself to be the founder and sole patron behind Anonymous Was A Woman in the New York Times. Up to that point, she’d given $5.5 million to 220 artists. Unterberg, 77, is a photographer who lives and works in New York City. An inheritance from her father makes the grants possible. She’s a private person and was concerned about how her own work would be evaluated if she was recognized as a philanthropist.

Eventually, she determined it was more important to be able to use her voice to speak up for women artists. The Times reported she “decided to come forward so that she can more openly argue on behalf of women who are artists, demonstrate the importance of women supporting women and try to inspire other philanthropists.” Unterberg said: “It’s a great time for women to speak up. I feel I can be a better advocate having my own voice.”

The 2018 grantees are the first cohort announced since Unterberg identified herself. The selection includes four black artists:

Deborah Roberts of Austin, Texas, works primarily in collage. Sourcing images from photographs, magazines, and the Internet, she makes abstracted representations of black girls that explore race and identity issues and notions of beauty and body image. Her first solo exhibition at Stephen Friedman Gallery opens summer 2019 in London.

A Brooklyn, N.Y.-based multidisciplinary artist and co-founder of the Black Lunch Table program, Heather Hart‘s work “explores nostalgic futurism, amalgams of distorted traditions and symbols.” Her latest work includes a series of site-specific rooftop installations that address issues such as history, perception, and liminality.

Spanning photography, performance, painting, sculpture, film, and video, the work of Cuban-born, Boston-based María Magdalena Campos-Pons is often autobiographical. Currently, she is the endowed Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair of Fine Arts at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. In 2019, she is serving as artist-curator for the Havana Art Biennial in Cuba.

Michèle Stephenson is a filmmaker, artist, and author based in Brooklyn, N.Y. A former human rights attorney, she co-founded Rada Film Group, with her husband Joe Brewster, to tell stories rarely presented in mainstream media. Best known for the 2012 documentary “American Promise,” she contributed to a New York Times Op-Docs series called A Conversation on Race (2015-17). Stephenson’s subjects often draw on her international legal experience and Panamanian and Haitian heritage, among them, her current feature film “Hispaniola,” which is in progress.

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Do you enjoy and value Culture Type? Please consider supporting its ongoing production by making a donation. Culture Type is an editorially independent solo project that requires countless hours and expense to research, report, write, and produce. To help sustain it, make a one-time donation or sign up for a recurring monthly contribution. It only takes a minute. Many Thanks for your support.

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